Stashpad

Stashpad started as a tool for my own workflow: I wanted todo capture that was as fast as a scratchpad but persisted somewhere I already lived — plain markdown files. Every existing app either owned my data in a proprietary store or was too heavy for split-second capture.

The result is a desktop app built with Electron and React that treats your markdown files as the database. Edit in Stashpad, in your editor, or in anything else — it all stays in sync.

Markdown checkboxes are already a perfectly good todo format — the gap was tooling. Stashpad watches your files and renders them as an interactive list, writing changes straight back to disk:

The hardest calls were about what to leave out. No projects, no tags, no due-date engine — anything that slowed capture was cut. The bet is that a todo app wins on the two seconds it takes to get a thought out of your head, and everything else is secondary.

Releasing it publicly meant hardening file-watching against editors that write via temp-file swaps, handling conflicting edits gracefully, and packaging auto-updates — the unglamorous 80% that turns a personal tool into a product.